A herd of eight goats will spend its summer eating invasive plants in natural oark areas in Ottawa County.

Ottawa County has a new weapon in the fight against invasive plants. This week, I got a chance to check out the weapon in action at Burr Oak Landing, a 260-acre natural park about 20 miles west of Grand Rapids.

As part of her job, Manion manages almost 7,000 acres of natural parkland.

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“The idea behind this project came from this right here,” Manion says, pointing to a thick green vine twisted on itself on the forest floor.

“This is oriental bittersweet. It is a ground cover that can grow two to three feet on top of itself. It makes this impenetrable mess and then it climbs the trees and chokes the trees out and kills them,” she said.

Manion says the vine has been in Ottawa County for at least a couple of decades.

"Young trees it just pulls right down and it just smothers everything in its path."

Luckily, Manion’s eight goats love the invasive plant. The heard is her new weapon to fight invasive plants.

They’re fenced off in one area of the park, eating day and night; as much as their little goat tummies desire. After a few more weeks, Manion says they’ll pack up the portable electric fence and move the goats, so they can destroy invasive plants in the next section of forest.

“Can you kind of see the difference between where they’ve been working and the jungle that it used to look like?” she asks.

Big time.

Vines of oriental bittersweet wrap around this tree, causing major damage.

Credit Lindsey Smith / Michigan Radio

Not only do the goats do a great job clearing unwanted, invasive plants, they save Ottawa County money. This way, the county doesn’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to manually clear the plants or dump lots of herbicide that would “kill everything in its wake” because oriental bittersweet is covering many of the trees.

Using goats to mow down hard-to-reach, persistent, or poisonous invasive plants isn’t a new idea. Manion says she heard of it at a conference.

“Being in Ottawa County, we have very deep agricultural roots,” Manion said. “I knew a lot of people who had pet goats but had a hard time feeding them because goats eat a lot. And so I thought this would be a great win-win. We could provide them free food and they would get rid of our invasive species and I don’t have to pay for it.”

Donations helped pay for the goats. Manion says students and volunteers care for and check on the goats twice a day. At the end of the summer, the goats will be auctioned off, recuperating the cost of buying them.

Manion hopes the students helping from Ottawa County’s Intermediate School District will continue the pilot program once it’s over at the end of next summer. Or, she'd love it if a someone took it up as a start-up business.

Ottawa County isn’t the only local government that’s recently decided to employ goats to control invasive plant.

The Environment Report for Thursday, November 20, 2014 — Creating an invasive species database

More than 2,500 species of plants, fish and mollusks will be invading the internet soon.

It’s an effort by more than 20 museums and universities around the Great Lakes region (including the University of Michigan, Michigan State University and Central Michigan University). They’re teaming up to digitize their collections of species that are not native to the Great Lakes.

Ken Cameron directs the Wisconsin State Herbarium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he’s leading the project. He and his collaborators will be pulling fish and mollusks out of jars and taking dried plants out of drawers, taking photos of them, and uploading them to the online collection along with data about the species. He and his colleagues around the region will be doing this for 1.73 million specimens.

A program to remove invasive plants is coming to Detroit's Belle Isle this summer.

A federal grant from the EPA of almost half a million dollars will go to Friends of the Detroit River. Sam Lovall is the project manager. He says removing the invasive plants is really important for the health of the island's ecosystem.

"Although some of them are quite attractive, they tend to overpopulate the area," said Lovall.

"They are very aggressive and they can compete very well with some of our native plants."

More than 130 scientists and the state’s environmental groups are calling on Gov. Rick Snyder to veto a bill they call anti-science. The bill would forbid the Michigan Department of Natural Resources from protecting native wildlife and plants on the pure merits of protecting nature.

The bill would prohibit the Department of Natural Resources from managing state lands for biodiversity.

It would prohibit the agency from managing forests for restoration.

It would end work to eliminate invasive species.

It would strike from the law the finding that most losses of biological diversity are the result of human activity.

A herd of goats has been evicted from weedy lots on Detroit's west side.

The animals were brought into the blight-ridden Brightmoor neighborhoods late last week to eat the overgrown weeds and grass.

But the city of Detroit swooped in straight away to shut down the goat farm, called Idyll Farms Detroit, noting that current zoning laws don't allow goats within the city limits.

Overgrown weeds and trash on Westbrook Street, between Acacia Avenue and Kendall Street, made the block nearly impossible to pass through. The Brightmoor community partnered with Idyll Farms to clear it.

On Memorial Day weekend, the community loaded up five 30-yard Dumpsters with trash. Eighteen male goats were brought in Thursday afternoon to be used as lawn mowers, so volunteers can pick up the trash.

Around noon the next day, Detroit Animal Control showed up to enforce an ordinance against farm animals within the city limits.

Leonard Pollara is a consultant with Idyll Farms Detroit. He said that Idyll Farms was aware that an ordinance existed, but they were asked by the Brightmoor community not to engage with city hall, and said the city would not enforce the animal control ordinance.

Pollara said that Idyll Farms was fully prepared to remove the goats at any time if the city required them to do so.

Pollara added that Detroit has not yet perfected an ordinance that would allow for farm animals within agriculture zones. However, Idyll Farms has experience in operating farms and managing agriculture systems.

“We are very interested in offering our resources and expertise to the city,” Pollara said.

Pollara added that they are not interested in backing away and want to remain in a partnership with the Brightmoor community.

If you’ve got a large piece of land that’s overgrown with weeds and brush, you could bring in big lawnmowers and bushhogs. But if you want something a little more low-key… you could rent a goat. Tanya Ott brings us the story of one Michigan couple who've built a business on landscaping with goats.